Resources and training to support people working together in co-produced health and social care research

Project aims

This project aims to share learning about co-produced research across different organisations, to support more equal relationships between everyone involved in co-producing research. We want to enable everyone to share power more effectively when working together on health and social care research.

What we did

Through this project we:

• facilitated five workshops where we tested out different tools and techniques to facilitate discussion and debate about everyone’s experiences of co-production
• developed a half-day training course for researchers, public contributors and professionals who want to co-produce research
• shared existing tools and resources to support co-production
• shared information, learning and skills across university departments, and beyond to local charities and the clinical commissioning group.

Open access to resources we have developed

We worked together with people who have been involved in co-production to jointly create:

• a map of resources to guide researchers, professionals and public contributors through the different tools and guidance that can help people produce research together. This includes tools to support remote co-production, on p.13-18.
• reflective questions to help everyone think about how they can work with people more equally through a process of co-produced research, including considerations to think through, when involving people remotely.
• a training course “Co-production in health and social care research”. Feedback from participants included that: “I’m inspired to look at working in co-production projects – I like the creativity and more egalitarian approach to creating knowledge”; “Overall was excellent”; “I feel inspired just to try something”. We are developing an online version of this course and will be advertising future dates.

Commentary article published

Co-authored with two public contributors who were involved in our project and workshops, in a published commentary article we bring together key tips that might help when co-producing research. This includes thinking about who is involved and when in a co-production project, and how to navigate challenges with respect to communication and relationships. In our project we found it difficult to bring all co-production principles into practice, as they are highly aspirational. It is helpful to be honest about the difficulties this way of working involves, and we include reflections on this in the article.

Funding

To undertake this project, we received funding from the University of Bristol:

• Public Engagement Funds
• Research Staff Development Fund.